1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to the processing of child support payments and the processing of child support disbursements by a processing entity. More particularly, the invention relates to methods and apparatus for processing child support payments using debit-based transactions and processing child support disbursements using addendum-based transactions by a processing entity, such as a state disbursement unit or any commercial, governmental, or other entity.
2. Description of the Related Art
If an employee owes a permissive or mandatory obligation to a third party, the employee has few options for making recurring payments through the employer. Presently, most employers do not have the capability to process payments and disbursements for an employee through their payroll systems. If an employee has a recurring permissive obligation, the employee may make payments on this obligation through the traditional means, such as, for example, payment by cash, payment by a check, or electronic payment through the employee's bank. Similarly, if an employee has a recurring mandatory obligation, such as, for example, a child support payment, an alimony payment, or other similar court-enforced mandatory obligations, the employee may also make payments on these obligations through the same traditional methods. In either of these situations, however, there are few options for an employee to make payments or disbursements through an employer.
For recurring mandatory obligations, one option is for an employer to withhold an amount from an employee's wages and to make subsequent disbursement of the amount to a particular receiving entity. This withholding generally occurs as a court-sanctioned withholding, such as a garnishment. For example, there are presently systems that allow the payment and disbursement of child support obligations from an employer directly into the bank account of a state's child support agency. One present system comprises computer software that allows an employer to extract data from any corporate financial application in order to process the obligation. The software then connects with an automated clearinghouse and processes an electronic payment for the obligation. The electronic transaction is a credit-based transaction. In a credit-based transaction, the automated clearinghouse issues a credit to the state agency based on the amount of the obligation. The bank for the state agency receives the credit and subsequently issues a debit against the bank account of the employer. The automated clearinghouse receives the debit from the bank of the state agency and processes the debit against the bank of the employer. When the amount of the obligation is satisfied through the automated clearinghouse, the credit held by the bank of the state agency is satisfied by the debit issued against the bank or the employer. Another present system performs similar operations, but the system functions only on its own proprietary software. These current methodologies for payment and disbursement processing are inefficient and undesirable based at least on three grounds.
First, the current methods for payment and disbursement processing require that employers use credit-based transactions. These transactions involve numerous interactions with an automated clearinghouse, which involve both financial and temporal inefficiencies. A credit-based transaction is financially inefficient because this type of transaction requires more interactions with an automated clearinghouse. Each time that a transaction passes through an automated clearinghouse, a processing fee is charged. Also, a credit-based transaction is temporally inefficient. Because a credit-based transaction must pass through an automated clearinghouse in multiple incantations, this type of transaction takes more time to complete.
Second, the current methods for payment and disbursement processing only allow the processing of one financial transaction at a time. This inefficiency results because the current methods use a payment format that is limited to one financial exchange per payment or disbursement transaction. For all electronic transactions with an automated clearinghouse, there are four available formats: cash concentration or disbursement (CCD), cash concentration or disbursement plus addenda (CCD+), corporate trade exchange (CTX), and corporate trade payments (CTP). The current systems utilize the CCD+ format, a combination of the CCD format and an addendum. The CCD+ format is limited to a single addenda record and is thus limited to one payment and disbursement per transaction. An addenda record enables the exchange of electronic payments as well as payment-related information through financial institutions over an automated clearinghouse network. In contrast, the CTX format allows one electronic payment to cover multiple obligations, therefore including up to 9,999 addenda records. The CTP format utilizes a distinct combination of addenda records, but the CTP format was discontinued effective April 1996. Therefore, because the current systems only utilize the CCD+ format, they can only process transactions one at a time.
In addition to these financial and temporal inefficiencies, the current methods also contain inherent structural inefficiencies. The current methods for payment and disbursement processing all require a bank both at the beginning and at the end of each financial transaction. Accordingly, these systems do not allow the employer to initiate a financial transaction to a recipient directly through an automated clearinghouse. Instead, the systems require that an employer initiate the financial transaction at a bank, that the bank process the financial transaction through an automated clearinghouse, and that the automated clearinghouse complete the transaction between the employer and the recipient. For the current systems, these processes include multiple transactions through the automated clearinghouse. These structural inefficiencies inure due to the inability of the employer to initiate or process electronic transactions through an automated clearinghouse.
The inefficiencies and other shortcomings in the current methodologies for payment and disbursement processing reflect undesirable diminutions in capacity and quality that could be achieved by further development of improved payment and disbursement processing methods. Thus, the current payment and processing methods reflect an unsatisfactory development of methods and systems to process both the permissive and mandatory obligations of an employee by an employer and subsequent disbursement to an intended recipient, in particular, to process a child support obligation of an employee by an employer and subsequent disbursement to an intended recipient by a processing entity, such as a state disbursement unit or any commercial, governmental, or other entity.